Encounter: The Shape of a pocket: For other revolutions taped and remixed at PANAF hosted by Pungwe Listening with Memory Biwa and Robert Machiri
Date: Saturday 31st August
Time: 16:00 – Film screening, duration 90 mins
18:30 – 21:00 Pungwe – Listening live mixtape performance
/Click/click/ click/A Black Mass/snap/snap/stick/click/
word/Pungwe Listening/ Our entire body is the ear/This full bodied account does not only specify corporeality/It is pinned on the spatial/Spiritual matters; the practice of making room(enough for everyone)/ Space prepared for us to pause/Play and m/o(u)r/n/ a history/Massing to light/Marching from darkness/A temporal mission were morning is turned into a collective adjective/Metaflow/flow
‘For other revolutions’ is a public gathering that presents Le premier festival culturel panafricain de Algiers (PANAF) staged as a film, excerpts of which will be versioned-in-other-forms, auditorily, for the collective exhibition. The PANAF film was directed at the height of the anti-apartheid movement in southern Africa. While there are several sequences of liberation movement representatives from the region in the street parades, it is hard to get a sense of their presence in Algiers. Yet the opening of the film commences with a powerful chant and song by Swapo freedom fighters: ‘Our country, our people, will be liberated by our own hands! Down with Imperialism, Down with Colonialism!’ ‘Colonialism, we must fight until we win! Imperialism, we must fight until we win!’ These impressions stay with the viewer until the fading chants are met with a rejoinder by Miriam Makeba, and Dorothy Masuka’s ‘Ntyilo, Ntyilo’, a pause to reflect, until the images and sound erupts again.
The film is a visceral rendition of music, poetry, theatre, street processions, dance, visuality, and improvisation. It is an arresting 90 minutes of a singularly intact archive of cultural revolution. It portrays a genealogy of PanAfricanist conferences and festivals, that spanned the entire black world, and resonated with the geopolitical moment of a generation that was. And argues for the ‘war of national liberation as a cultural act’. Our response is not a nostalgic bent that re-creates a void, and thereby linearity, instead we are interested in the paradoxes and contestatory grounds in the ambitions of the festival, of the era, as it proceeds as a disjuncture into our contemporary cultural and political moment.
And more: the film’s approach to audio/visual material, comics, logos, travelogues spliced, found footage, documentary film extracts and on site re-enactments juxtaposed, with fragmented and cacophonous music, re-doubles as a haunting, augmented artefact and mixtape. Our reply is to enact other forms, ‘versionings’, ‘a way of creating incompleteness and ongoingness at the same time’.
Pungwe Listening presents a live mixtape imagined by use of their record library, alongside excerpts from the PANAF film. The live recording of the session will be presented in the group exhibition at TIER from October.
Pungwe Listening:
Memory Biwa and Robert Machiri form the duo Pungwe Listening, founded in 2016. Their work centres Southern African aural histories and multi-media archives, and present relational art formats through performance, installation and collective curatorial practice in an extended play in public space.
Memory Biwa is a historian, and artist. Her research addresses anti-colonial resistance, genocide, memory and reparative processes in Namibia. Biwa’s practice pivots on aurality, historical production, and geographies.
Robert Machiri is a sound artist and hoarder of sound-related objects. Machiri’s work exists at the juncture of two streams of practice; curatorial concepts founded through the notion of conviviality and art as pedagogy.
Citation:
All phrases in the write-up inverted commas are from the film, except the last one, which is from William Pope.L (Artforum, December 28, 2023)
Image credit: The image (Poster series) is inspired by the official poster for PANAF, 1969. Drawing, and design by Robert ‘Chi’ Machiri.
Event held onsite: Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin